Perturbation

"When your head is chopped off, you don't say that your health is perturbed." - Prof. P. Raghunathan, quoted in Prajna, 1979. Yet the Government of India euphamistically refers to the Narmada oustees as “Project Affected People”.
Somnath Mukherji writes in The Statesman:

Affected? People whose home, hearth environ, history and religion are submerged are not “affected”; they are ravaged. People who have never had a share of the State’s benefits and stand to gain nothing from the dam, to say the least, are the ones paying the price... The government needed to be reminded by the Supreme Court that clean water is a basic need for human existence. So beholden is the State to the corporation that it bestows upon it total impunity in mere anticipation of the economic benefits to flow... de-linking development from grassroots aspirations will only delegitimise the State and its agencies in the eyes of the very people who justify its existence.

So complete is this delegitimization in the post-Katrina US, that the only way the administration feels they can keep a rein on us any more is by constant monitoring of the entire population (a la "1984") with the entusiastic support of your phone company and ISP. Brave new data mining worlds!